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Fallen Gods - upcoming Norse saga-inspired roguelite from Wormwood Studios

Alpan

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Grab the Codex by the pussy Pathfinder: Wrath
> meta-progression

[...]

For instance, we could have different god builds unlock but then the vanilla runs would be less varied.

I suggest that this would be more than compensated by player ignorance.

Being a new player is not the same thing as being the designer of the game. From what I've read of the manual, there is no reason why a new player would judge even a somewhat constrained, vanilla run to be "less varied". Having no sense of the possibility space, what would the player even compare it to? Would the player not react positively, and play even more, when he or she finds out variety-enhancing options (which are distinctly different from Skinner box methods) unlock as he or she puts in more hours? Wouldn't that be more appealing, in terms of the game revealing its possibilities?

Even if you have no concrete plans for content unlocks, the same process can still be used to ease players into the game's possibilities.
 

agris

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a lot of unlock-based rogue-like design, while addictive to consume, is based around Skinner box methods that I am philosophically opposed to. I’d rather people replay because the loop is fun and they keep finding new content than because killing 100 trolls unlocks a slightly different god build. (To be clear, I find meta-progression entrancing as a player, so I see why designers do it, but I have certain quirky design taboos.)
You are the first designer I have ever seen who uses this language. I too vehemently dislike the exploitative nature of skinner-box design, it's my principal complaint against Diablo 2 and it's ilk. I would never associate long term gains such as what I was describing with Skinner box methods, but it has been a very long time since intro to psych. My recollection of what makes Skinner box design exploitative is the constant drip-drip-drip of dopamine provided to the player as they are incrementally rewarded for mundane tasks - at a relatively high frequency. Providing several unlockable meta-progression options seems a far cry from that, but I admire the instinct to not want to foster addiction and exploitation of the playerbase. Maybe just give the actual implementation and ramifications of meta-progression more thought as FG works its way to release.
 

MRY

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Alpan This is a decision I can kick down the road for a bit, since for at this stage of development and testing, it would make sense to focus on the "fully unlocked" set of options. That said, there isn't that much we can lock/unlock. Because there are not that many items -- an absolutely fundamental pillar of design is to have a low number of almost old-school-Zelda-like items that really mix things up, rather than having incrementalist gear -- I'm not sure we can lock items without breaking world gen. (Almost all the items are placed during world gen, rather than being propagated on the fly, so that you can find out where an item is via lore, etc.) Nor can we lock follower types. So it would really be something like:
  • Vanilla God has 5 might, 4 wits, 7 MHP, an eagle fetch, Soulfire, and Healing Hands.
  • Deathlore, Farsight, Wildheart, and the three other fetches would unlock down certain victory paths or significant in-game events.
  • Certain events would raise the thresholds on the three core stats (e.g., killing such-and-such troll raises the might threshold by 1), so that over time, the amount of starting-stat variety changes.
It might work. I'm not sure. I guess my goal was always to offer players maximal variety from the outset so that even if you're repeating an event you've seen before (which happens pretty quickly, even though we have hundreds of events), the paths through it are likely to be different.

agris I always talk like a zealot, but whether I'll have the courage of my convictions, who knows? My view in this particular instance comes from wasting time on Vampire Survivors, which is a pretty mindless game with exactly the kind of progression I describe -- the gameplay is hypnotic, and after some counter gets high enough, you unlock some new character or item that doesn't really change the gameplay at all. IIRC, Cardinal Quest, a flash rogue-like game I wasted a lot of time on, had a similar kind of unlocking path. I guess the challenge to me is that it is absolutely obvious that unlocking stuff is a joy to players (myself included), but it can be used to mask an underlying mediocre gameplay loop.
 

Alpan

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Grab the Codex by the pussy Pathfinder: Wrath
This is a decision I can kick down the road for a bit, since for at this stage of development and testing, it would make sense to focus on the "fully unlocked" set of options. That said, there isn't that much we can lock/unlock. Because there are not that many items -- an absolutely fundamental pillar of design is to have a low number of almost old-school-Zelda-like items that really mix things up, rather than having incrementalist gear -- I'm not sure we can lock items without breaking world gen. (Almost all the items are placed during world gen, rather than being propagated on the fly, so that you can find out where an item is via lore, etc.) Nor can we lock follower types.

I agree that it's generally too early to be deciding anything about meta-progression.

I did pick up on the intentionally impactful design of all the elements: god powers that each do a lot, fetches with multiple benefits each, rule-warping items. Items and events (and perhaps god powers) could still work as an avenue for meta-progression, and I think events are particularly good candidates given that they are likely to be perceived as the "meat" of the game, and meta-progression could be woven into the game as the way the world reveals itself. Just a thought.

One thing I should note is that the opposite of having really impactful items isn't necessarily incrementalism, and I did not have on-the-fly item generation in mind at all -- in fact it is probably standard for a non-Skinner roguelike/lite to pregenerate all items during world generation, to be dependent on the initial seed and nothing else. The suggestion is rather simpler -- preventing certain items from generating initially and unlocking them as the player goes on subsequent runs, perhaps in a way that encourages other play styles. (Crude example to show off my manual-reading credentials: Player obtains Songbridge victory, unlocks Karringold)

Ultimately you end up at the same place as when you do if you offer everything from the start, but the player will have a different, probably gentler experience going through it. (Processing information -- "maximal variety" -- is hard.) Your game design is not particularly exploitative, all games are time thieves, and you would be offering a journey (meta-progression) to the player in a genre players expect to go on the journey.
 

MRY

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Ah. I left out part of the issue on items. If the game needs to place X unique items at world gen, you need at least X unique items in the pool. And in practice, you need more than X because not every item placement will accept all the items; instead, a wizard’s lair might only accept, say, the Skinbound Book, the Deadblade, and the Black Candle, while a jarl’s heirloom gift might be the Deadblade, Nail, or the Hornberk. If all those are already placed or not yet unlocked, then the event can’t occur. That in turn requires finding a substitute event, but if none is available, world gen breaks.

FG content is very expensive to produce, so there’s not a ton of slack in the supply. As you lock items or events, the likelihood of breakage or samey-ness goes way up.

That means any unlocks would have to relate to the god’s conditions. For instance, we could unlock starting items.

Anyway, it’s a downstream issue. First I need to finish the bare minimum content. There are still a couple dozen unwritten events, for instance.
 

MRY

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Yeah; Barbarian Prince is one of those things that I look at and realize how feeble I am compared to the great man.
 

Alpan

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Grab the Codex by the pussy Pathfinder: Wrath
Ah. I left out part of the issue on items. If the game needs to place X unique items at world gen, you need at least X unique items in the pool. And in practice, you need more than X because not every item placement will accept all the items; instead, a wizard’s lair might only accept, say, the Skinbound Book, the Deadblade, and the Black Candle, while a jarl’s heirloom gift might be the Deadblade, Nail, or the Hornberk. If all those are already placed or not yet unlocked, then the event can’t occur. That in turn requires finding a substitute event, but if none is available, world gen breaks.

Sorry, I am probably being stupid, but don't all these constraints render any given run less dynamic? It seems to me that you're describing a system in which dungeons, events and items are coupled with each other, and this would facilitate "calculating 37 moves ahead" more than it would rolling with what the game gives you.
 

MRY

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Many events (such as civ quests, dungeon stacks and culminating events, barrows, and locations) are placed at world gen, and to the extent they have item rewards, the rewards are assigned then. Some events, such as encounters and surprises, spawn as you play. If they award items (which is less common), the items must come from unassigned items and the small number of items that can spawn more than once per map.

This does facilitate planning ahead, which helps with the strategic level, but you don’t know what is where when things start. You can find out information via Farsight, lore in settlements, information gained as event rewards, and from a raven fetch. And by exploring—if you enter a cave and hear the howling of wolves, for instance, you have some sense what the stack and culmination are going to be.
 

MRY

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It’s like if a Freecell game were dealt facedown but you can sometimes peek at a card. Figuring out how to peek and where to peek is important because you can’t win Freecell without pre-planning, but you also can’t plot 37 moves ahead because too much is unknown.
 

Alpan

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Grab the Codex by the pussy Pathfinder: Wrath
I understand, and to be clear, I wasn't implying the game would be "solvable". I was thinking more of the item pools -- if different dungeons and different event types have their own item pools, then that's a fundamentally more tractable problem (i.e. easier to make an educated guess about/plan for) than it would be if the items were simply random or distributed by some other criterion unrelated to the dungeon/event type (i.e. "rarity"), right?
 

bionicman

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a lot of unlock-based rogue-like design, while addictive to consume, is based around Skinner box methods that I am philosophically opposed to. I’d rather people replay because the loop is fun and they keep finding new content than because killing 100 trolls unlocks a slightly different god build. (To be clear, I find meta-progression entrancing as a player, so I see why designers do it, but I have certain quirky design taboos.)
You are the first designer I have ever seen who uses this language. I too vehemently dislike the exploitative nature of skinner-box design, it's my principal complaint against Diablo 2 and it's ilk. I would never associate long term gains such as what I was describing with Skinner box methods, but it has been a very long time since intro to psych. My recollection of what makes Skinner box design exploitative is the constant drip-drip-drip of dopamine provided to the player as they are incrementally rewarded for mundane tasks - at a relatively high frequency. Providing several unlockable meta-progression options seems a far cry from that, but I admire the instinct to not want to foster addiction and exploitation of the playerbase. Maybe just give the actual implementation and ramifications of meta-progression more thought as FG works its way to release.

Meta-progression isn't just about Skinner box, it can be used to gradually introduce more complicated mechanics (in games which aren't roguelikes/lites, you do this by simple giving the player items later in the playthrough, since it's just... progression). Slay the Spire is not really a roguelike (more of a rogue-lite?), but I like the way it handled the introduction of new elements/game mechanics into the game. Also, the meta-progression doesn't have to be 'obvious' to the player, it could be hidden from the player, but the player should also have the option to just go into the game settings and press a button which unlocks all the content immediately. So, I actually don't think meta-progression is bad!
 

MRY

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A progression dynamic in which the player’s mastery of one mechanic introduces a new mechanic (such as unlocking new units in an RTS campaign) or in which overcoming one kind of challenge introduces new challenges—those are great. Even just adding acknowledgement of the player’s achievements is itself a plus. The danger is that these elements can mask gameplay that lacks inherent dynamism and development; the prize implies the achievement, and the sense of having achieved is enough to keep the player going even if nothing actually has been achieved.

For FG, my worry is that subtracting elements that otherwise would be available from the start would be a way of incentivizing continued play while actually making the play experience a bit worse.
 

Alpan

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Grab the Codex by the pussy Pathfinder: Wrath
What's the engine, by the way? I searched the thread but couldn't find specifics.
 

Alpan

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Grab the Codex by the pussy Pathfinder: Wrath
Thanks, not sure how I missed that. Also found out (reading the old updates...) that the game was partly inspired by The Peregrine, which was surprising and a title I did not expect to encounter today. I ought to reread that...
 

MRY

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Its melancholy tone had a big effect on me generally. Obviously, its actual effect on specific content is limited; it's more a tonal influence.
 

Zombra

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Make the Codex Great Again! RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is. Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
rating_citation.png

https://lmgtfy.app/#gsc.tab=0&gsc.q="barbarian prince" game
 

Alpan

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Grab the Codex by the pussy Pathfinder: Wrath
Zombra: I appreciate your retort showing fine Codexer style, but I respect Mark too much to sully his thread with more crap of my own. Anyway, BP may or may not have been endlessly fascinating (I have never played it, and "citation needed" means I couldn't tell from Googling and reading about it); but in the age of supercomputers it's not necessarily a bad idea to leverage some of that capability to go beyond what it prescribes. That will be all.
 
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MRY

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Barbarian Prince was a huge inspiration for FG, and if you have time Alpan, you should poke around the manual and event book (which are free from Dwarfstar) simply to see how a young Arnold Hendrick (creator of Darklands) figured out how to make a single-player open-world RPG via tabletop tools. That said, I’ve only tried to play the game a couple times, and I'm not sure it's anything more than a historical artifact at this point because it's very cumbersome to play in comparison to either a computer game or less open gamebooks like Lone Wolf.

With FG, I definitely drew a lot from BP, but we've add quite a lot of complexity. Some of that comes from stuff like god skills, derived stats, the increased role of followers, the greater variety of items, and the much, much more elaborate event system. Some of it is more mechanical, like our combat system, though still basic, is quite a bit more complex, and then we have procedural world gen. So I guess I'd say I agree with both of you: Zombra's admiration for the game, and your point that the upper limits of complexity for a single-player tabletop game shouldn't set a ceiling for a computer game.
 

agris

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MRY i couldn’t quite tell from the manual, but in combat is your STR your armor? Say your god has 8 str, is hit for a raw 10 damage, then MHP is decremented by 2?
 

MRY

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That’s not how it works but the basic point is right. Might affects both offense and defense.
 

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